Symfony 1.4 partial model rebuilds

A couple of months ago we started building out a Symfony 1.4 project for a client that involved allowing a “super admin” to add Doctrine models and columns at runtime. I know, I know, crazy/terrible/stupid idea but it mapped so well in to the problem space that we decided that a little “grossness” to benefit the readability of the rest of the project was worth it. Since users were adding models and columns at runtime we had to subsequently perform model rebuilds as things were added. Things worked fine for awhile, but eventually there were so many tables and columns that a single model rebuild was taking ~1.5 minutes on an EC2 large.

Initially, we decided to move the rebuild to a background cron process but even that began to take a prohibitively long time and made load balancing the app impossible. Then I started wondering is it possible to partially rebuild a Doctrine model for only the pieces that have changed?

Turns out it is possible. Looking at sfDoctrineBuildModelTask it looked like you could reasonably just copy the execute() method out and update a few lines.

Then, the next piece was just building the forms for the corresponding models. Again, looking at sfDoctrineBuildFormsTask it looked like it would be possible to extract and update the execute() method.

Anyway, without further ado here is the class I whipped up:

Using it is pretty straightforward, just call FastModelRebuild::doRebuild( array(“sfGuardUser”, “sfGuardUserProfile”) ); and thats it!

Anyway, fair warning I’d only do something like this if you “Know what you are doing” ™